Somehow the same World setting that allowed normal people to cultivate to levels where Newtonian Physics no longer applies also requires you to use flowers and roots as cultivation resources to do it.
How eating a ginseng and sitting in a cave can let your body evolve the ability to punch black holes I'll never be able to figure out.
What do you guys find ridiculous about cultivation novels?
Legion20 Even worse then that is when they use "Resource Scarcity" as the reason for the confrontation.
Makes you wonder how they were able to train several thousand people to the Realm where food is no longer needed for the human body to survive, while also not having enough resources available that every can of Pepsi is worth fighting to the death over.
The hidden upper cultivation realms. Like at the beginning, the maximum is level 9 and then the MC discovers he was a frog in a well, and th levels are up to 12. He strives to surpasses odds to become level 12. Again he discovers he's too weak after moving to another continent. He finds that one can go up to level 20. And so on and so forth... 
Right about everything.
Level 1: Offend people on purpose, go through hardship, meet a potential lover, help the less fortunate, triumph as the underdog.
Level 2: Offend people on purpose, go through hardship, meet a potential lover, help the less fortunate, triumph as the underdog, learn something about bloodline.
Level 3: Offend people on purpose, go through hardship, meet a potential lover, help the less fortunate, triumph as the underdog, learn something about bloodline, learn you are special.
Level 4: Offend people on purpose, go through hardship, meet a potential lover, triumph as the underdog, learn something about bloodline, learn you are special, find special treasure.
Level 5: Offend people on purpose, go through hardship, meet a potential lover, triumph as the underdog, learn something about bloodline, learn you are special, find special treasure, enter cultivation for long periods of time.
Level 6: ............
Level 7: ...................
Some cultivation novels are like watching a replay of the same movie, but a little 2 minutes more of an extended version of the movie each time you watch.
ngl, the mcs are pretty imba, plis nerf
Situation 1
Idiot:"How dare you stand in my way?!"
You: "Wtf? The way is so big why do you want to go on a straight line?"
Idiot: "This lord can do whatever he wants!"
You: "Retarded, Totally unreasonable, Prolonging word coun— forget I wrote that."
Ridiculous.
Situation 2
Mc: Got bullied for being trash + Found a treasure = Genius only found in 10000 years.
And with a childhood girl—friend that would become one of his wife.
Woebegone One of my favorite episodes of Samurai Jack used this troupe in a way that both makes sense and none at all:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CPhwT3ujIc
I love this thread.
On another note, a plug for my novels where I avoid all of these things(Quite well, I like to think.)
World Domination System: Kingdom Building, Cultivation, War, Ruling
Age of Teras: Monster Evolution: Pokemon, but with different classes and cultivation theme(and other factors which are also more realistic)
Point 1: usually, the stories take place in lands with civilizations of more than 10,000 years (more than history on Earth). In the distant past, experts were everywhere to see, but no more now days. During those more than 10,000 years, there has been no progress at all, more a regression, no technology improvement, no science improvement, nothing about transports, communication etc. The information is privatized, hard to find in worlds where humans aren't the only dominant species. Normally, there should be efforts from mankind to share the knowledge and to try to improve itself, but never, only the strong has access to it.
Point 2: the worlds are so big, a mere country is larger than Russia with tens or hundreds million people. You don't have around 200 countries but thousands of them (minimum)... Most of those countries are isolationist, there is little communications, cultural exchanges between them but you have a homogeneous culture and language in the world.
Point 3: the currencies and their values. For commoners, it's metal coins, visibly acceptable everywhere in the world, the countries don't have their own systems... At a certain moment in the story, you don't care anymore about this currency and you trade with cultivation ressources. The problem is that those resources, even if sparse in theory, seems in reality illimited, and this currency system is not viable.
Point 4: the time that passes..., the real experts of the world are always old monsters who have lived for hundreds or thousands of years. Until the main character and gang catches up to them, nobody never managed to catch up for generations. Those old monsters usually have a unique son or daughter, for thousands of years of existence, this son/daughter is surprisingly the same age compared to the MC and will become a member of MC's gang. MC and gang usually managed to catch up in a few years/decades, when everybody else should at least spend centuries to do so. Often, only MC and gang + a few enemies are able to go from weak to strong and improve. All the other characters only show stagnation during those years of story.
Point 5: the auctions..., there are always auctions in those stories, and the treasure MC needs the most is always available in the auction next city, next month, even if he is the only one who don't know it before the beginning of the auction. There is always an intense bid competition to win the real treasure, and MC is always to poor, to alone to fairly compete for the treasure he needs the most. The winner of the auction is always a greedy enemy who want to snatch what MC has managed to buy but this greedy enemy will be killed and MC will get the treasure in the end.
ludo2776 Point 1: Ugh, cultivation Novels on thw whole are terrible about this. Somehow Mortal beings are able to understand the "Dao of water" enough to create Tsunamis and become Gods, but the idea of a water fountain or a refrigerator is beyond all modern science for these people. And don't get me started on how easy it would be to create a working telephone system when half the population can shoot lightning from their eyes.
Point 2: Riding the coat tails of #1 that everyone keeps all education and cultivational knowledge a secret: illiterate farmers three continents away from each other all speak the exact same language and can all exposition dump the entire history of the Sect the MC just angered as if they read it's Wikipedia entry. Even worse when the MC is an isekai and has to "hide the fact he doesn't know anything about the advanced workings of this world" even though EVERYONE in the starter village shouldn't know that much either.
Point 3: There is no Industrial or Socio-Economics for most Dirt farmers in these Worlds, so who is standardizing and printing all of these coins and evenly distributing them across the entire 1 billion kilometer Continent? As you said, cultivators don't use coins...
Point 4: Cultivation creep in the most annoying thing I can think of when it comes to consistency issues in Wuxia Novels. In the Protagonist's starting town the highest Cultivation is a level 0.5 Grandfather who's the Head of the biggest clan. It took him 80 years to get that far.
Next Arc the MC faces a 20 year old who's power level is 1.5, meaning he only took 10 years to triple the cultivation of the strongest known person previously mentioned. But it's okay because he's a "Genius"
Skip to the following Arc and all of a sudden there are 12 year old Lolis who have reached 3.0 God realm in just 2 years of training! This means their average cultivation speed is 1.25 levels Per Month! But after meeting the MC they stay near that level for the next 2 years as they tag along as a Harem Member. It gets so bad that towards the end of the Novel, we start seeing level 10.0 cultivators (that are somehow the same age as the MC) coming out of the woodwork and you have to stop and think "How do these people find the time to look for trouble when they should logically be spending every second of everyday power leveling in some cave just to justify their growth rate?"
Point 5: I've always hated auction arc for how lazy and cliche they always are. MC needs something, Young Master wants it too, "YOU DARE!", ~Face Slap~, then they get hunted down after they leave and have to flee to the next town, Repeat ad nauseum.
For a 10000 - 50000+ year old history span, their level of technology should have already reached Information age (Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) if not middle ages or later. Should I say that practically almost every emperors, kings or royalties just focused in their military power side instead of technological one? I'm just speculating this as I'm not expert in history. If the all those years were invested to improving cultivation and medicine at the same time perfecting it, Why are there still "Trashes" around big clans? Their cultivation manuals should be extremely efficient and modernized to suit the new era youths.
What always bothered me was that there are clans/sects/kingdoms with THOUSANDS of years of history, each generation married to several women over hundreds of years, yet the most promising young master is coincidentally born around the same time as the MC?
Like there is usually no age difference between the MC and the young master.
What happened in the last 500 years? Did the old man JUST now decide to have children?
And even when there are older siblings, the difference isn't that much.
2. The world is static.
Like others before me have pointed out, there are no new technologies/innovations, no introduction of anything remotely useful. Time is still measured in "cups" and "breaths" after millions of years. Like really bruv?
3. Unrealistic reactions.
"You dare hurt XX Master?" cliche needs to die out FAST.
4. Too many lucky accidents, MC finding exactly what he needs without much effort. No work involved. It becomes so boring.
ludo2776 I aree with everything from point 2 on. Point 1 is a different story. The regression is logical due to the isolationist tendencies of the cultivators . They segerate themselves from "mere mortals" and then seperate further into sevts and clans that have little to do with each other. Even within the sect and clans, they compete for resources as well as the attention of elders. These policies encourage regression rather than innovation.
In essence, in order to see more progress and less regression, one would have to foster a ciultivator society that looks outward as a whole instead of inward.
Also "reincarnating" into the body of a dead cultivator, keeping memories, acting completely different and yet either no one notices or they are happy that they finally turned their life around and are taking cultivation seriously.
The Magus era’s distinctively ridiculous scale of measurement. A 4 foot loli carrying an 87 foot(or was it meters?) club etc.
What is reincarnation? You taking control of an another intelligent organism or even objects while keeping your previous life's memories? Or You inheriting your past memories in the context of you still bring you? Where do those memories come from? Your soul, brain, limbic system, nowhere,2.5 Petabytes with a RAM of 100 TB? Is reincarnation simply moving original inside you then pasting it to others, much like simulation theory? Or an actual feat that's unanswerable now by our current technology? Maybe rebirth by traveling to the past isn't actually your past, but a different plane or a parallel universe with almost perfect similarities compared to earth? Haha joke.
Pretty cool thread. Kind of like my cheatsheet on reading Cultivation stories.
Woebegone I've always thought that Spirits/Souls/Consciousness that makes up us humans was a particular electromagnetic wavelength unique to each person. This contains all of one's experiences and memories in stasis, unable to change on it's own.
On the other side is the human body with it's own magnetic waves (Alpha waves/Theta waves when you dream) that is able to affect the Soul's own fields, much like how information is written onto a hard drive.
In this example the Soul would be a program, telling the body how to operate; and the body would utilize it's ability to control physical space to give feedback to the soul, overwriting previous thoughts and memories and thus making the soul stronger/smarter.
Without a body the soul cannot change by itself. This is why you hear about ghost being trapped in a cycle of confusion is ghost stories. This also makes them more susceptible to outside influences such as Mediums who's bodies have a higher level of spiritual attunement and can affect wandering spirits.
So when someone "Reincarnates", their spirit is taking over the body of someone who's own spirit was too weak to handle the stress it's body experienced and "Died" prematurely, even though the body was still salvageable. Then the protagonist's spirit is altered by the new bodies unique electromagnetic composition and has memories/thoughts/skills added to it's previous one's when the story starts.
This is just my personal headcannon about how these things work, who really knows.